Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In this article we propose to reflect upon the use of the concept of "integrality" as a tool in the training of health professionals. We give special attention to the need to listen to health demands, as they must be the basis for the construction of care practices that are participatory, ethical, sympathetic and centred on relationships. The results of the analysis suggest that the main challenges for the training of health professionals are: to develop the professionals' awareness of the need to act critically when faced with the need to attribute responsibilities and to establish a dialogue between governing bodies, managers, users, training institutions and other sectors of society, in an attempt to seek the integrality of health care.

This essay attempts to examine the concept 'working body' and develop a critical reflection about the educational principle of aesthetics and the origin of artistic knowledge, understood in Marxist theory as a contribution to the studies developed in the areas of Work and Education. In our view, these studies fail to consider the aesthetical issue as one of the elements in the cultural history of the worker. On the basis of this analysis, the text presents the main ideological demands and conceptual changes of the bourgeois teleology of art and of the teaching of art in Brazil in the official documents of the most recent Brazilian legislation on education.

This article relates an experience of cooperation through a network of institutions oriented to the training of health technicians, under the guidance of the Pan-American Health Organization (OPS). It also deals with present changes in the field and with the new human resources policies, with their respective implications in the world of work and of education. The experience may be regarded as an attempt to integrate the social-affective and technical processes that give strength and dynamism to the Network of Health Technicians (Rets). We examine its creation, objectives, structure and organization, as well as the OPS' management and the role of the institutional actors called Development Nuclei (Nudes) and their stimulating projects. Finally, we point to the advantages and progressive characteristics of the work done by professionals in the various Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean countries. We focus in particular on the innovative management mechanisms in technical cooperation when we discuss the factors that affect the sustainability and the possibility of success of network experiences that have the potential to mobilize and articulate horizontal cooperation in a globalized world.

This paper discusses the role distance education plays in the training of health professionals, in particular with regard to the democratization of opportunities, in the context of the strategies for the consolidation of the Brazilian Health System (SUS). Grounded on the experience of the Course of Pedagogical Training in Professional Education in the Area of Health: Nursing (run by the Secretariat of Health Work and Education Management of the Ministry of Health), the text presents strategies that, in this modality, are able to introduce pedagogical proposals related to the kind of public policies that, regarding education in the area of health as a social right, attempt to respond to the demands for this type of education. Verifying the need for more projects of this nature in the field of health, and being aware of the fears both teachers and pupils have of the 'electronic sirens' singing' and of the risk that this type of training may become too superficial or too detached from reality, we reaffirm our belief that distance education is, more than anything else, genuine education.

The growing integration of the Information and Communication Technologies with communication and educational processes requires new forms of organizing and transmitting knowledge. With this in mind, the present article examines distance education (educação a distância - EaD) pointing to the risks involved in mistaking technical innovation for pedagogical innovation; and it also gives emphasis to the importance of transferring the focus of the debate on EaD from 'modality' to 'method', and from teaching organization to forms of teaching and of learning. For this purpose, we must consider the two dimensions of technique - as an object of study and as a pedagogical tool - and also the interdisciplinary character of education. The approach we present here is set over against the technicist conception of teaching. It removes technology from the centre of the educational process and emphasizes the latter's historical and social dimension. In our view, more than being a way to fill the gaps in the educational system, EaD tends to become a regular element in the current teaching systems and, if it is carried out with a open teaching perspective and integrated with conventional teaching, it can help to make the access to education more democratic.

Public Health and Education are the main areas to which Professor Victor Vincent Valla has been devoting himself since he arrived in Brazil in the 60s. Graduated in Education, with a Master degree and a PhD in Social History by the University of São Paulo (USP) and a post-doctoral degree by the University of California, Valla is now titular researcher at the Samuel Pessoa Department of Endemic Diseases of the National School of Public Health Sergio Arouca (Ensp), researcher at the Research Laboratory for Practices of Integrality in Health (Lappis) and assistant professor at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UFF). Valla is the author of a large number of works on culture, social participation, civil rights and religiosity, in which he explores the intrinsic relationship between these themes and the field of education in the area of health. In this interview, he discusses the concept and the practices of popular education, the notion of 'technical training', religious culture, poverty and public health, giving emphasis to the need to understand the perceptions and everyday life of the less privileged classes and strongly suggesting that this understanding can significantly improve the training of health professionals and, consequently, the Brazilian Health System (SUS).      

Con este artículo se pretende continuar con el debate y las reflexiones acerca de la Educación a Distancia (EaD). Para ello se propone: en primer lugar, algunas consideraciones generales que tienen que ver con la Educación a Distancia y el uso de las Nuevas Tecnologías de la Información y de la Comunicación (NTIC) y su desarrollo en la sociedad actual. En segundo lugar, y pensado muy especialmente en la formación de formadores, se pasa a plantear la necesidad de construir una 'didáctica crítica', que rompa con los modelos de tipo tecnicista que hasta hoy han sido preponderantes en la EaD. De ese modo, se intentan recuperar o bien abordar las dimensiones políticas y éticas de la didáctica y el desarrollo de sujetos y profesionales críticos.

The development of professors is a highly important subject at a time when undergraduate programs in all higher-education health courses are going through changes in their curricula and methodologies. This article analyses ideas, propositions and characteristics of the process. By dialoguing with the existing literature, we analyze not only teaching for higher-education in health as a complex and interdisciplinary social practice but also the development of health professors, seeking, thus, to learn the peculiarities, potentials and challenges of the processes. This way, the practice of the professor is considered a crucial axis in training health professionals.

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